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Temple U Business School To Stream Classroom Lectures

By Dian Schaffhauser

01/19/09

The Fox School of Business at Temple University in Philadelphia has selected Mediasite from Sonic Foundry as the class capture platform for the newly constructed Alter Hall, its $80 million business school facility opening later this month. Every lecture in the building will be streamed with Mediasite RL Recorders, which are installed in each of its 30 classrooms in Alter and adjoining Speakman Hall. Two mobile Mediasite ML Recorders are available for offsite Webcasting needs. A massive multi-imaging video wall measuring 15 feet by 5 feet at the building's entrance can stream real-time Mediasite lectures to draw visitors into the educational experience.

The Mediasite Webcasting and content management system automates the capture, management, delivery, and search of rich media presentations that combine audio, video and accompanying graphics for live or on-demand viewing.

"Alter Hall was the first facility at Temple designed with course capture in mind. We've established very stringent performance expectations in the last few years, and with our selection of Sonic Foundry, we know we're doing business with the most established, highly productive academic capture organization in the world," said David Feeney, director of digital education at the school of business. "Mediasite has helped put us in the position to leverage ourselves as a worldwide operation, working 24/7, right out of the box."

The university has used other lecture capture systems, said John DeAngelo, assistant dean of instructional technology at Fox. "But when we decided to adopt on a larger scale we looked at the evolution of Mediasite. We wanted the advanced features to stream live, the confidence in monitoring, and the searchable nature of the content," he explained. "Now that we have the ability to stream live for the first time, we have instructors interested in reaching students both in the classroom and offsite simultaneously. Mediasite opens up new opportunities for us to spread Fox education everywhere."

In addition to course capture, tiered case study rooms are equipped with two projectors, two screens, ambient miking, a "follow-cam," wireless Internet, and power at each desk. Larger rooms integrate lecture capture with video conferencing technology and taskless voice amplification and recording. Group work is facilitated by seats that swivel 360 degrees and a modular computing set up in information system labs. Podiums are height adjustable, equipped with a computer, a tablet to capture an instructor's handwritten notes and audio, and video and lighting controls with a memorization feature for the settings of each class. Network-based control systems allow smart classroom management including opening and closing rooms, AV/computer troubleshooting and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communication to the control room. The world's longest ticker tape will feed stock prices above the heads of students in one of the building's lounge areas.